Tag Archives: Google Translate

Eleven years ago, Google Translate was created to break down language barriers. Since then, it has enabled billions of people and businesses all over the world to talk, connect and understand each other in new ways.

And we’re still re-imagining how it can be used—most recently, with music. The music industry in Sweden is one of the world's most successful exporters of hit music in English—with artists such Abba, The Cardigans and Avicii originating from the country. But there are still many talented Swedish artists who may not get the recognition or success they deserve except for in a small country up in the north.

This sparked an idea: might it be possible to use Google Translate with the sole purpose of breaking a Swedish band internationally?

Today, we’re presenting Translate Tour, in which up and coming Swedish indie pop group Vita Bergen will be using Google Translate to perform their new single “Tänd Ljusen” in three different languages—English, Spanish and French—on the streets of three different European cities. In just a couple of days, the band will set off to London, Paris and Madrid to sing their locally adapted songs in front of the eyes of the public—with the aim of spreading Swedish music culture and inviting people all over the world to tune into the band’s cross-European indie pop music.

William Hellström from Vita Bergen will be performing his song in English, Spanish and French.

Last year Google Translate switched from phrase-based translation to Google Neural Machine Translation, which means that the tool now translates whole sentences at a time, rather than just piece by piece. It uses this broader context to figure out the most relevant translation, which it then rearranges and adjusts to be more like a human speaking with proper grammar.

Using this updated version of Google Translate, the English, Spanish and French translations of the song were close to flawless. The translations will also continue to improve, as the system learns from the more people using it.

As the novelist and physician Khaled Hosseini wrote “if culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside”. We agree—language is incredibly important, not only for understanding culture, but also for accessing information in general. That’s why over the past several months, we’ve been updating our products to work better for the many Indian language users coming online every day. In April, we launched several new features and updates, including neural machine translation for more languages, and just a few weeks ago we enabled voice input for additional eight Indian languages. Today, we’re bringing several updates to the Google Translate app, making it easier for speakers of Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu to translate when they’re on the go. Now, you can do offline translations and instant visual translation in seven more Indian languages, type a Translate query with your voice in eight more languages (the seven above and Malayalam), and use conversation mode in two more languages: Bengali and Tamil. All these features have been available in Hindi, and are now accessible for more languages on both Android and iOS*.

Offline Translation in seven more Indian languages

With Google Translate, you can easily turn your phone into a powerful translation tool––for studies, business, or travel. But whether you’re on a spotty connection in a remote area or just want to switch off data while you’re on the go, sometimes you’d like to translate a word or sentence even when you’re not connected to the internet. This rings particularly true for us here in India, where connectivity can be an issue. To help you translate in moments like this, we’ve already enabled Offline Translation in Hindi, and now we’re launching the feature for seven more Indian languages––something many Indian users have asked about.

If you’d like to do offline translations in say Kannada, you can download the Kannada language pack when you’re on WiFi. Then just open the Translate app, select Kannada on either side of the screen and then tap the download button. English is automatically embedded in all language packs, so you can start translating offline between English and your language straight away.

Instantly translate signs or menus with Word Lens––now in more Indian languages

With today’s update, we’re also launching instant visual translation for these seven Indian languages, so you can now translate signs or menus from English to Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu, in addition to Hindi. The Translate app already lets you use camera mode to snap a photo of English text and get a translation for it in these languages. Now, we’re taking it to the next level and letting you instantly translate text using your camera—so it’s way easier for speakers of local Indian languages to understand English street signs in the city, or decide what to order from a restaurant menu. Word Lens ispowered by machine learning, using computer vision to distinguish between letters on an image.

To get started, open the Translate app, point your camera at an English sign or text, and you’ll see the translated text in your language overlaid on your screen. If you’re using Word Lens in a language for the first time, you might be prompted to download a translation file first, as Word Lens works offline.

Start a bilingual conversation in Bengali or Tamil (and Hindi)

Conversation mode is a feature that lets you have a bilingual conversation with someone, simply by talking to the Google Translate app. For instance, when you’re at a marketplace trying to snag a good deal on that shawl, Conversation Mode can help you converse with the locals. This already works for Hindi, and today we’re launching two additional languages: Bengali and Tamil. Simply tap the mic to start speaking in a selected language, then tap the mic again, and the Google Translate app will automatically recognize which of the two languages are being spoken, letting you have a fluid conversation—it’s like having an interpreter in your pocket!

Translate with your voice in nine Indian languages

Typing in Indian languages on a phone can be slow and cumbersome, in fact more people in India are using their voice to “type” a translation query than the keyboard. That’s why we’re excited to bring Voice Translation to more Indians––with the recent launch of voice input for eight additional languages, speakers of Hindi and now Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and Tamil can dictate their translation queries using their voice. For instance, if you’re on the go and would like to type with your voice in Urdu, open the Translate app, select Urdu on the left side of the screen, and tap the microphone to start talking.

We’re hoping these new features help further bring down language barriers and provide more Indians with the ability to access information around them. All features announced today are already available in Hindi on the Google Translate app, and have started to roll out in the additional Indian languages both on Android and iOS*. With these updates, the Google Translate app supports Offline Translation for 59 languages, Word Lens for 37, Voice Translation for 66, and conversation mode for 40 languages. Our goal is to bring these and other features to more and more languages, breaking down language barriers in India and countries around the world.

*Please note that Voice Translation for the eight additional Indian languages currently only works on Android, but we’re looking to roll it out on iOS soon

More than 400 million people in India use the internet, and more are coming online every day. But the vast majority of India’s online content is in English, which only 20 percent of the country’s population speaks—meaning most Indians have a hard time finding content and services in their language.

Building for everyone means first and foremost making things work in the languages people speak. That’s why we’ve now brought our new neural machine translation technology to translations between English and nine widely used Indian languages—Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada.

Neural machine translation translates full sentences at a time, instead of pieces of a sentence, using this broader context to help it figure out the most relevant translation. The result is higher-quality, more human sounding translations.

Just like it’s easier to learn a language when you already know a related language, our neural technology speaks each language better when it learns several at a time. For example, we have a whole lot more sample data for Hindi than its relatives Marathi and Bengali, but when we train them all together, the translations for all improve more than if we’d trained each individually.

Left: Phrase-based translation; right: neural machine translation

These improvements to Google Translate in India join several other updates we announced at an event in New Delhi today, including neutral machine translation in Chrome and bringing the Rajpal & Sons Hindi dictionary online so it’s easier for Hindi speakers to find word meanings right in search results. All these improvements help make the web more useful for hundreds of millions of Indians, and bring them closer to benefiting from the full value of the internet.

More than 400 million people in India use the internet, and more are coming online every day. But the vast majority of India’s online content is in English, which only 20 percent of the country’s population speaks—meaning most Indians have a hard time finding content and services in their language.

Building for everyone means first and foremost making things work in the languages people speak. That’s why we’ve now brought our new neural machine translation technology to translations between English and nine widely used Indian languages—Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada.

Neural machine translation translates full sentences at a time, instead of pieces of a sentence, using this broader context to help it figure out the most relevant translation. The result is higher-quality, more human sounding translations.

Just like it’s easier to learn a language when you already know a related language, our neural technology speaks each language better when it learns several at a time. For example, we have a whole lot more sample data for Hindi than its relatives Marathi and Bengali, but when we train them all together, the translations for all improve more than if we’d trained each individually.

Left: Phrase-based translation; right: neural machine translation

These improvements to Google Translate in India join several other updates we announced at an event in New Delhi today, including neutral machine translation in Chrome and bringing the Rajpal & Sons Hindi dictionary online so it’s easier for Hindi speakers to find word meanings right in search results. All these improvements help make the web more useful for hundreds of millions of Indians, and bring them closer to benefiting from the full value of the internet.

Half the world’s webpages are in English, but less than 15 percent of the global population speaks it as a primary or secondary language. It’s no surprise that Chrome’s built-in Translate functionality is one of the most beloved Chrome features. Every day Chrome users translate more than 150 million webpages with just one click or tap.

Last year, Google Translate introduced neural machine translation, which uses deep neural networks to translate entire sentences, rather than just phrases, to figure out the most relevant translation. Since then we’ve been gradually making these improvements available for Chrome’s built-in translation for select language pairs. The result is higher-quality, full-page translations that are more accurate and easier to read.

Today, neural machine translation improvement is coming to Translate in Chrome for nine more language pairs. Neural machine translation will be used for most pages to and from English for Indonesian and eight Indian languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. This means higher quality translations on pages containing everything from song lyrics to news articles to cricket discussions.

From left: A webpage in Indonesian; the page translated into English without neural machine translation; the page translated into English with neural machine translation. As you can see, the translations after neural machine translation are more fluid and natural.

The addition of these nine languages brings the total number of languages enabled with neural machine translations in Chrome to more than 20. You can already translate to and from English for Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, and one-way from Spanish to English.

We’ll bring neural machine translation to even more languages in the future. Until then, learn more about enabling Translate in Chrome in our help center.

Half the world’s webpages are in English, but less than 15 percent of the global population speaks it as a primary or secondary language. It’s no surprise that Chrome’s built-in Translate functionality is one of the most beloved Chrome features. Every day Chrome users translate more than 150 million webpages with just one click or tap.

Last year, Google Translate introduced neural machine translation, which uses deep neural networks to translate entire sentences, rather than just phrases, to figure out the most relevant translation. Since then we’ve been gradually making these improvements available for Chrome’s built-in translation for select language pairs. The result is higher-quality, full-page translations that are more accurate and easier to read.

Today, neural machine translation improvement is coming to Translate in Chrome for nine more language pairs. Neural machine translation will be used for most pages to and from English for Indonesian and eight Indian languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. This means higher quality translations on pages containing everything from song lyrics to news articles to cricket discussions.

From left: A webpage in Indonesian; the page translated into English without neural machine translation; the page translated into English with neural machine translation. As you can see, the translations after neural machine translation are more fluid and natural.

The addition of these nine languages brings the total number of languages enabled with neural machine translations in Chrome to more than 20. You can already translate to and from English for Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, and one-way from Spanish to English.

We’ll bring neural machine translation to even more languages in the future. Until then, learn more about enabling Translate in Chrome in our help center.

There are currently over 400* million Internet users in India, but with only 20% of the population fluent in English, most Internet users have significant language barriers to getting the full value of the Internet. A speaker of Indian languages like Hindi or Tamil still has trouble finding content to read and or use services that they can use in their own languages.

To build rich and empowering experiences for everyone means first and foremost making things work in the languages people speak. Today, we’re taking a huge step forward by launching new set of products and features that will empower the Internet ecosystem to create more language content and better serve the needs of a billion Indians who’re coming online rapidly.

Neural Machine Translation: The world’s content, in your language

Starting today, when you use Google Translate, you might notice that the translation is more accurate and easier to understand, especially when translating full sentences. That’s because we’ve brought our new Neural Machine Translation technology to translations between English and nine widely used Indian languages — Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam and Kannada.

Neural translation is a lot better than our old phrase-based system, translating full sentences at a time, instead of pieces of a sentence. It uses this broader context to help it figure out the most relevant translation, which it then rearranges and adjusts to be more like a human speaking with proper grammar. This new technique improves the quality of translation more in a single jump than we’ve seen in the last ten years combined.

Just like it’s easier to learn a language when you already know a related language, we’ve discovered that our neural technology speaks each language better when it learns several at a time. For example, we have a whole lot more sample data for Hindi than its relatives Marathi and Bengali, but when we train them all together, the translations for all improve more than if we’d trained each individually.

Phrase based Translation Neural Machine Translation

You can try, these out on iOS and Android Google Translate apps, at translate.google.co.in and through Google Search.

But how does this make the whole web better for everyone — Chrome has it covered!

That’s where Chrome’s built-in Translate functionality comes into play. Every day, more than 150 million web pages are translated by Chrome users through the magic of machine translations with one click or tap. The Chrome team and the Google Translate team have worked together to bring the power of Neural Machine Translation to web content, making full-page translations more accurate and easier to read.

Today, we’re extending Neural Machine Translation built into Chrome to and from English for the same nine Indian languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil Telugu and Hindi). This means higher quality translations of everything from song lyrics to news articles to cricket discussions.

Gboard in 22 Indian Languages and more

Being able to type in your language of choice is as important as understanding content on the web. Today, we are ramping up support to include 11 new languages to the list of 11 existing Indian languages —with transliteration support—including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, and Gujarati.

Gboard has all the things you love about your Google Keyboard — speed and accuracy, Glide Typing and voice typing — plus Google Search built in. It also allows you to search and use Google Translate right in your keyboard (just tap the “G” button to get started). And—as a reminder—Gboard already has a Hinglish language option for those of you who often switch back and forth between Hindi and English.

With today’s update, we’ve also dropped in a new text editing tool that makes it easier to select, copy and paste, plus new options for resizing and repositioning the keyboard so it fits to your hand and texting style. And to top it all off, this Gboard update comes with some under-the-hood improvements including better accuracy and predictions while you type

Like Google Indic Keyboard, Gboard has auto-correction and prediction in these new languages, plus two layouts for each—one in the native language script and one with the QWERTY layout for transliteration, which lets you spell words phonetically using the QWERTY alphabet and get text output in your native language script. For example, type “aapko holi ki hardik shubhkamnay” and get “आपको होली की हार्दिक शुभकामनायें ”.

This is available today on Google Play Store,so make sure you’re running the latest version of the app.

Auto-translated local reviews in Maps

The local information across Google Search and Maps helps millions of people, every day, to discover and share great places. Our goal is to build a map tailored to each user and their likes and preferences and make it work for everyone in their local languages. Starting today, we’ll automatically add translations to local reviews on Google Maps, both on mobile and desktop. With this update, millions of these reviews – from restaurants to cafes or hotels – will appear in your own language.

All you need to do is launch Google Maps, open reviews, and they’ll appear in both the original language as well as the language you set on your device. So for instance if you speak Tamil and travel to Kolkata, and you want to see reviews of the popular restaurants in Kolkata, you can now automatically see reviews both in your own language and the original language of the review.

Hindi Dictionary in Search

When you search for the meaning of a word in English, for instance “meaning of nostalgic”, you’ll get a dictionary straight in Google Search. Today, in collaboration with the Oxford University Press, we’re bringing the Rajpal & Sons Hindi dictionary online. This new experience supports transliteration so you don’t even need to switch to a Hindi keyboard. So the next time when you’d like to know more about a word, say Nirdeshak, you can just type in Nirdeshak ka matlab in Search, and you’ll instantly get to see word meanings and dictionary definitions on the search results page, including English translations.

While all these new products and improvements takes us closer to make the web more useful for Indian Language users. We realise that we can’t do this alone, we need India’s internet ecosystem to come together to build apps and more content to make India’s Internet that serve its users need. And one way to effectively get the Internet Industry together to solve for local language users is to really understand the users, understand their needs to shape India’s Internet landscape. We have worked with KPMG India to compile an industry report titled “Indian Languages - Defining India’s Internet” - which provides rich insights on what we need to do together as an Industry to bring the Internet alive for every Indian.

We’re honored to have partnered with Dr. Louise Banks, esteemed linguistics professor, to develop instant camera translation for our 32nd language, Heptapod B. Following our experience with logograms in Chinese and Japanese, as well as the many characters containing circles in Korean, we were ready to blend our expertise in low-memory-footprint convolutional modeling and Dr. Banks’ linguistic background to the deciphering of circular logograms in the Word Lens feature in the Google Translate app.

The challenge with understanding Heptapod B is its nonlinear orthography. Fortunately, Google's neural machine translation system employs an encoder/decoder system that internally represents sentences as high-dimensional vectors. These vectors map well to the non-linear orthography of the Heptapod language and they are really the enabling technical factor in translating Heptapod B.

We interpret Heptapod B into English, Chinese, Danish, Japanese, Urdu, Russian, French, Spanish and Arabic. As with our other Word Lens languages, it works offline, which is really handy if you happen to need to read a circular logogram in an isolated location. Dr. Banks assures us that the app will continue to work for at least 3,000 years.

Communicating across language (and glass) barriers can be a rather alienating experience. While learning a new writing system can be quite rewarding and even a mind-altering experience, not everyone has time for that. So whether the world’s fate hangs in the balance, or if you’re simply trying to discern whether your coffee stain ring means something, we wish you success as you integrate this tool into the story of your life.

We’re honored to have partnered with Dr. Louise Banks, esteemed linguistics professor, to develop instant camera translation for our 32nd language, Heptapod B. Following our experience with logograms in Chinese and Japanese, as well as the many characters containing circles in Korean, we were ready to blend our expertise in low-memory-footprint convolutional modeling and Dr. Banks’ linguistic background to the deciphering of circular logograms in the Word Lens feature in the Google Translate app.

The challenge with understanding Heptapod B is its nonlinear orthography. Fortunately, Google's neural machine translation system employs an encoder/decoder system that internally represents sentences as high-dimensional vectors. These vectors map well to the non-linear orthography of the Heptapod language and they are really the enabling technical factor in translating Heptapod B.

We interpret Heptapod B into English, Chinese, Danish, Japanese, Urdu, Russian, French, Spanish and Arabic. As with our other Word Lens languages, it works offline, which is really handy if you happen to need to read a circular logogram in an isolated location. Dr. Banks assures us that the app will continue to work for at least 3,000 years.

Communicating across language (and glass) barriers can be a rather alienating experience. While learning a new writing system can be quite rewarding and even a mind-altering experience, not everyone has time for that. So whether the world’s fate hangs in the balance, or if you’re simply trying to discern whether your coffee stain ring means something, we wish you success as you integrate this tool into the story of your life.

(Okay, if you haven’t guessed already... we’re just having some fun here. But we really are eager to bring Word Lens and Neural translation to more languages, so stay tuned.)

We’re honored to have partnered with Dr. Louise Banks, esteemed linguistics professor, to develop instant camera translation for our 32nd language, Heptapod B. Following our experience with logograms in Chinese and Japanese, as well as the many characters containing circles in Korean, we were ready to blend our expertise in low-memory-footprint convolutional modeling and Dr. Banks’ linguistic background to the deciphering of circular logograms in the Word Lens feature in the Google Translate app.

The challenge with understanding Heptapod B is its nonlinear orthography. Fortunately, Google's neural machine translation system employs an encoder/decoder system that internally represents sentences as high-dimensional vectors. These vectors map well to the non-linear orthography of the Heptapod language and they are really the enabling technical factor in translating Heptapod B.

We interpret Heptapod B into English, Chinese, Danish, Japanese, Urdu, Russian, French, Spanish and Arabic. As with our other Word Lens languages, it works offline, which is really handy if you happen to need to read a circular logogram in an isolated location. Dr. Banks assures us that the app will continue to work for at least 3,000 years.

Communicating across language (and glass) barriers can be a rather alienating experience. While learning a new writing system can be quite rewarding and even a mind-altering experience, not everyone has time for that. So whether the world’s fate hangs in the balance, or if you’re simply trying to discern whether your coffee stain ring means something, we wish you success as you integrate this tool into the story of your life.

(Okay, if you haven’t guessed already... we’re just having some fun here. But we really are eager to bring Word Lens and Neural translation to more languages, so stay tuned.)